by the recurrence from time to time of Indian wars. I think the simple record above sufficiently accounts for them. In 1870 General Sheridan wrote: "So far as the wild Indians are concerned, the problem to be decided is: Who shall be killed, the whites or the Indians? They (meaning the interior department), can take their choice. Since 1862, at least eight hundred men, women and children have been murdered within the limits of my present command in the most fiendish manner, the men usually scalped and mutilated, their privates cut off and placed in their mouths; women ravished fifty and sixty times in succession, then killed and scalped; sticks stuck into their persons before and after death."
General Sherman also wrote strongly against the Indian apologists and sympathizers a few years later, referring to the great number of persons butchered in the department east of the Rocky mountains.
It has been too often the case that military men sided with the Indians against their own race, causing the pioneers of the west who had suffered in their persons and fortunes, to suffer again in their feelings. The Indian ring, besides, gave cause of offense by holding "councils," which were practically fairs, at which the Indians were enabled to purchase complete supplies of arms and ammunition for a raid, which usually followed immediately afterwards. With such supplies they massacred the garrison at Fort Fetterman, and Custer's command on the Little Big Horn, Montana; the residents at the White-river agency in Colorado; and the unsuspecting people of Idaho. These severe lessons have not been entirely lost on military or public sentiment. The absence of such knowledge in military circles accounts reasonably for the blunders of the army in Oregon, in pioneer times. The conquest of Mexico and California had led army officers to believe that it was a little thing to subdue wild Indians—an error which General Clarke and Colonel Wright finally corrected, since which time the army has faithfully defended the frontiers, once guarded only by the heroic pioneers, to commemorate whose labors this history is written.
